Selling ‘The Drama’: A post-release, spoilers-inclusive discussion
Looking at the first few days of discourse around A24’s dark comedy.
The new film The Drama, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, was released last Friday. I reviewed it last week, giving it a mostly positive review, but noted that it’s likely to be divisive, and that the people who hate it are really going to hate it.
I also, in that review, avoided spoiling the film’s big plot twist, which, predictably, has been controversial, including the question of whether it should even count as a twist.
The early returns are good. The Drama made $14.4 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend, and with international numbers factored in, it’s already made back its budget. It’s also reportedly the third-biggest opening in A24 history.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the Tomatometer has it at 77 percent- and its audience score is even better than that, with 81 percent. It also has a B Cinemascore, which indicates, along with that RT audience score, that audiences aren’t walking out of The Drama feeling repulsed.
And why would they be repulsed? From here on out in this piece, spoilers for The Drama will be shared. If you haven’t seen the film yet, proceed at your own risk…
In The Drama, Pattinson and Zendaya play Charlie and Emma, a couple who have a meet-cute and are preparing for their wedding. For the first 20 minutes, it looks a lot like a thinking-man’s romantic comedy that’s told in a non-linear form, in the tradition of Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally.
But at that point, things take a turn when the central couple has a drunken dinner with the secondary couple, Mike and Rachel (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim). They play a game of “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and Emma’s answer stops everyone short: She admits that, as a teenager, she once plotted a school shooting, going so far as to acquire a gun and even write up a manifesto. She ultimately didn’t go through with it, and even later emerged as a gun violence advocate.
This revelation causes Charlie to doubt whether he wants to go through with the wedding, while Rachel — whose cousin was paralyzed in a school shooting — threatens to back out as maid of honor. The trouble soon cascades, from Charlie having an ill-fated fling with a coworker, to a subplot involving the wedding DJ possibly doing heroin, into a car crash of a wedding. Throughout, the film keeps thing at a slow boil, but manages to keep them funny.
The marketing and ancillary buzz of The Drama has hinted at a big twist, but has left audiences completely in the dark about exactly what it is. This was, if you ask me, the right decision: The big moment is supposed to be shocking, and it works better if it comes out of nowhere, for the audience as well as the characters. Plus, I don’t know how A24 could have possibly sold a film if it had gone forward with that premise (“a new school shooting-based rom-com, from the director of Dream Scenario…”)
